a milk tooth just below the base of that fine rib cage. He reached around behind her, moved his hand along the smooth silk of her back, could feel no exit wound. Not a bullet. She had been facing him when the mine had exploded. He hadn’t taken it all. Somehow a piece had reached her.
‘Shrapnel,’ he shouted over the din of the engine.
‘Moeder van God,’ said Crowbar. ‘Hold on.’
Clay could feel himself drifting away, the pain in his legs dominant now, crowding out any control he had left. ‘Get her to a hospital,’ he managed. ‘Keep her safe, Koevoet.’
Part V
52
Should Have Been Twenty
23rd November 1994: Just outside Nicosia, the Green Line, Cyprus
He was walking on the morning edge of a sandstone cliff. He stopped and looked out over a splitting chasm, the rock face disappearing in a vertical plunge to the wadi floor. Through the heat haze, he could see the thin, drawn-metal thread of a river, a cluster of mud-brick buildings, more scattered along the base of the far cliffs, patches of greenery following the places where water might be, everything as seen from the window of an airliner, drifting past in pressurised serenity. He knew this place, or parts of it, the broad trench of the Wadi Hadramawt, and down there now, suddenly close, a column of people moving in slow cadence across the dry plain. Tiny figures in black, throwing up a wake of dust. Men and women, dozens of them, trudging towards the cliff. He knew these souls. Each individual’s gait and dimensions of limb, each tilt of head, was known to him. Rania was there, and Abdulkader, though Clay knew he was dead, and Eben too, at the start of the war when he was still Eben, and Kingfisher and Bluey with both his legs, and others dead and living from that place and others. They were looking up at him now through the mist, eyes wide, calling to him, their mouths dark voids opening and closing, though he could not hear what they were trying to say. He called out to them from the clifftop, but they could not hear him. A drum banged in the distance. He searched the valley bottom for the drum but could see nothing, just the column moving closer to the cliff and the dust rising from their feet. Again the sound of the drum echoed from the valley walls, up the miles of smooth, red sandstone and he knew it was calling him. Clay leaned out over the edge, arms wide. The current of air rising from below held him suspended above the void like an invisible pair of hands so that he could see clear down, the whole cliff-face there below him and the faces looking up at him and the bang of the drum and the wadi floor so far below that it would take a lifetime of falling to reach it.
He jumped.
And suddenly the cliff edge was the cargo door of a Hercules and he was falling away from it, and as the ground floated up towards him, he knew that he could not go back, that even here time moved in one direction only and its tyranny was absolute. His right hand moved instinctively for the rip cord but he knew no canopy would blossom above to carry him gently to Earth, and he knew Eben was not there behind him, nor Koevoet, nor any of Valk 5, living or dead, and the ground pulling him down was not the green of Angola now but the dead, dry dune ground of some other place, and then, closer, voices, faint at first, louder now, blunted somehow, muffled.
You killed them.
Yes, he heard himself answering. I killed them.
And the woman?
Rania.
Who is Rania?
She’s there. I can see her.
Where is she?
There, in the wadi, looking up at me.
Did you kill her too?
Clay opened his eyes.
He was lying face down in a hospital bed. Sweat covered every part of his body. He could smell the laundry-fresh smell of the sheets, the antiseptic clean of the linoleum floor, the smell of his own sweat. Daylight shone white and diffuse from a louvered bank of windows. He tried to move his legs, but they were as if made of softwood, spongy and unresponsive. His skull ached. Clay ran his tongue around the parched desert of his mouth, tried to swallow.
Slowly, his vision sharpened. A private room. Whitewashed walls. A stainless-steel wash basin, a chair, an IV stand beside the bed, tubes